Joint Conference of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Working-Class Studies Association

Tag Archives: Keona Ervin

Keona K. Ervin is Assistant Professor of African-American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her current project, The Labor of Dignity: Black Women, Urban Politics, and the Struggle for Economic Justice in the Gateway City, 1931-1969, will be published by the University Press of Kentucky for their Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century series. Her teaching and research interests include African American women’s history, U.S. urban and labor history, and the history of black social movements.

In 1937 a group of radical labor activists and workers formed the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO). Their vision, influenced by the nascent industrial union and Popular Front movements of the 1930s, was unprecedented in breadth: they sought to organize the entire agricultural commodity industry, from the fields to the […]